It’s official – cold spell goes on into December

This morning extended outlook for the run up to Christmas makes interesting reading for those of us who are looking for frost and snow, well at least for the first couple of weeks. I keep an eye on the extended outlook (fig 1) that they provide and usually it’s fairly bland and noncommittal, in this one I note a tone that the NWP backroom boys have latched onto something that might require its very own news item, or who knows even a mention in their regular forecast outlook to COBRA. So all you contingency planners out there – get some salt in – you heard it here first!

5 thoughts on “It’s official – cold spell goes on into December”

I don’t know if there was any hail at 3am and there wasn’t any heavy rain at 4am but there was hail around 8am here.
The forecast now has heavy rain until 13:00 and the MO have issued a warning for snow and ice, between 18:00 and 11:00 tomorrow as I sort of anticipated yesterday, mainly for N Scotland and the East Coast of England.

It has been raining off and on all evening with more forecast overnight.
Judging from the forecast on BBC News tonight we seem to be heading for the sort of weather which produces snow down the east coast although it would seem to be a bit warm tonight. Maybe tomorrow night.

It rained between 09:00 and 13:00 but I wouldn’t call it heavy as it only totalled 5.8mm, and hardly at all around 14:00 when the MO forecasted another period of heavy rain.
There was no heavy rain tomorrow in this morning’s forecast but this evening they have a period at 04:00, preceded by hail showers and three more periods of heavy rain at 10:00, 11:00 and 12:00.
Heavy rain keeps materialising on the 24 hour horizon.

This morning’s MO forecast shows a 90% chance of heavy rain from 09:00 to 12:00 and 80% at 14:00,whereas yesterday’s showed only one period at 09:00 and light rain thereafter.
Weather Network shows only patchy rain all day from 10:00 to 18:00.
So once again the MO seem to have gone over the top on the forecast of rain, compared to WN.
There are signs that the rain has started so it will be interesting to see which is correct.

I bought a container of salt for my own contingencies a couple of years ago but i haven’t had to use it yet.
I remember during the 2009/10 winter I had to “borrow” some from the Local Authority piles (with permission) to keep my paths safe.